Carlie Brucia Follow-Up

Posted: Tue 6:21 PM, Feb 10, 2004&nbsp|&nbsp

Updated: Tue 6:21 PM, Feb 10, 2004

Carlie Brucia's parents will likely see changes in the Florida law that allowed their daughter's alleged killer to go free. The debate at the capitol now centers on how far can the legislature go to limit a judge's authority.

State Attorney Gen. Charlie Crist is leading the call for locking up probation violators like Joseph Smith who have a violent past.

"I think if you have those combination of factors you got to look a getting somebody back in jail to protect our citizen's and protect our children," says Crist.

Gov. Jeb Bush says his office is looking into what can be done, but he says it should not be a knee jerk reaction.

"I think we should be looking at the policy from the broader context, not always looking at a tragic case and then saying this is what we got to do because of that one particular case," says Gov. Bush.

But when reminded that the governor did advocate using Terri Schiavo's single case for enacting a law, he says it was different.

Florida lawmakers begin there annual session March 2, and it now appears to be a question of when not if during that 60 days that they take up what will likely be called Carlie's Law.

While conceding something must be done, Sen. Les Miller wants a thorough study of the probation issue before he jumps on the bandwagon.

"We don't have to do this right now, let's look at it real closely let's put something together that's going to be meaningful, something that's going to be substantive, something that will prevent this from happening again," says Sen. Miller.

There are 152,000 people on probation in Florida. Thousands of them are in violation at any given time. Putting them back in prison would cost the state more than $17,000 a year for each violator.

Former prosecutor and now State Sen. Rod Smith has requested sworn testimony as quickly as possible to decide if the probation law is really broken.

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